Welcome to the P-I's Real Estate blog. Here an assortment of real estate professionals discuss contemporary housing issues, facts, analysis and other information about state and national housing, plus rental markets, current real estate conditions, forecasts, gossip and opinion. They all make their living in the real-estate business in the Seattle area. But this blog isn't about selling. It's about sharing what they know or believe about the market — in their own words.

I’m not sure what caused the comments to be turned off in the other thread. It is possible for any of the main bloggers to delete individual comments if they’re over the line, and that would have possibly been preferable. I didn’t know that last December, when buddhabrad crapped on my Christmas Charity thread, so I turned off the comments then. If I’d known what I know now, I wouldn’t have done that.
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A lender I often work with, Todd Morton at Golf Savings Bank, must be watching a lot of late-night David Letterman shows, since he just sent me his Top 10 Reasons It’s a Great Time To Buy list.
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One thing that bothers me is the constant display of disregard for the importance of details. Our duties as a licensee certainly do not include the duty of good spelling, grammar or typing, but I can’t help but think it is one way of separating out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
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Taking pot-shots at agents is easy and fun, don’t you think? After all, real estate agents are an easy target. Don’t the polls say that we rank lower than car salesmen in terms of public perception? I think there are a lot of reasons why that is the case, and in some cases we do deserve the bad rap we get. But I think this is a typical case of people wanting to curse the darkness rather than lighting their own candle.
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OK, first of all don’t get bent out of shape for the sake of our buddy buddhabrad. He tipped his hand recently enough one could realize he is an ok guy. Heaven help me, I am growing fond of buddy buddhabrad.
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I’m not really into practicing scripted dialog for clients, or agent slogans (“It’s always a good time to buy!”), but there’s one agent slogan I actually think is worthwhile: Your Agent Matters.
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I was trying to determine what percentage of listings were currently vacant. It turns out it’s about 40% in King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties. Then I tried to determine whether that was historically high, low or average, but the only way I could do that was by looking at sales for prior periods.
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